


Jubilee Pizza

by Leofuller



Series: The Torchwood Account [3]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 07:19:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1931745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leofuller/pseuds/Leofuller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not just the team who make a living from Torchwood</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jubilee Pizza

**Author's Note:**

> This was a series of stand-alone pieces about the people who came into contact with Torchwood and had their Everyday touched by the Unusual. Originally published on LJ in 2008.

Reuben flicked a cloth along the counter. They’d been open ten minutes – no customers so far, but that was normal. Carl was out the back, chatting to Paulo as he prepped in the kitchen, waiting for somebody to order something so that he could deliver it.  
Reuben liked Carl, he was keen - but he was new, and they all got bored quick enough. Matt would be in later when they got busier and he needed more people out on deliveries, but Reuben would probably be on his own in the shop most of the afternoon.  
Nobody wanted that many pizzas on a Tuesday.

The phone rang with an order, and Reuben tapped the details into the computer automatically. Meat feast, Four cheese, Vegetarian with extra mushrooms and a Chicken and sweetcorn. Torchwood, paid by card.  
Reuben pressed the button to send the order to the kitchen, and then wandered through to the back to make sure that the rather temperamental machine was working. Carl stopped talking when he walked in, and Paulo gave him a rather curt nod and held up the print out of the pizza order.  
The shop door pinged and Reuben went to see to the customer.

Staff retention was something Jubilee struggled with. They weren’t a big chain, they didn’t have management training courses and things for his staff to aim for, not like McDonalds, say. Nobody with any kind of drive or ambition stuck around here. Reuben was the manager, and the other jobs were pretty much dead-end.  
Paulo had been here for months now, and Reuben was ashamed to say he knew almost nothing about the guy, not even which South American country was home. Paulo had the legal right to work in the UK, and he knew how to make pizza, and that was all Reuben needed to know.  
There had been a time when he’d cared. He’d tried to be friends with his staff, or at least as much as he could while being the boss, but the bright ones didn’t stop long and the dim ones didn’t want to know. So now he had a string of employees who changed every couple of months. Most of them did at least bother to hand in their notice when they got sick of putting pizzas into boxes and pushing them over the counter, or riding 'round Cardiff on a moped getting abuse from customers if they were late, but there were some who just vanished. Walked out mid shift , never came back from deliveries. Some of them even had the cheek to come back a week later to ask for their pay.  
Annie was one who hadn’t come in for her pay, and Reuben had assumed that she’d just quit. She’d gone out with the Torchwood order, and she’d not come back.  
Torchwood hadn’t ordered again for a while, and Reuben had been livid. If that stupid bitch had quit and taken the pizzas home, as some of the staff had been known to do, and he’d lost the Torchwood Account because of it…  
A regular order like that was worth hanging on to. They were a bit odd, the Torchwood lot. The order was delivered to a tourist office on the Plass, tiny little office, only ever the one guy in there, but he ordered four or five pizzas at the same time, at least once a week. The delivery staff were on first name terms with the guy at Torchwood, but so far none of them had managed to work out why he needed five pizzas at a time. Not that it mattered, he paid for five pizzas, and that was all Reuben cared about.  
So when Annie had buggered off in the middle of a shift, and Torchwood had stopped ordering, Reuben had called them, just to check. It turned out that Annie had delivered their pizza before she’d vanished, and that Torchwood had simply, coincidentally, decided to try the new pizza shop that had opened across town.  
Three days after that, a police officer had come in to tell him that Annie had died in a car accident. It had taken them a while to find him and let him know, because she’d had two other part time jobs, and the other employers had been trying to contact her whereas Reuben had just given up. The police officer was very understanding about the staff turnover.  
Torchwood had brought their business back to Jubilee Pizzas after about six weeks. They never said why, but Reuben had always said that his competitors couldn’t keep up, and this just proved him right.  
Either that or it was because he was just round the corner.

It wasn’t as if he needed their business – he had a steady income from takeaways, and the passing trade at pub kicking out time, but Reuben liked to keep his regulars. It made up, in a way, for being unable to keep his staff. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this management thing.  
“Hey guys.” The shop was quiet again, so Reuben wandered through to the back where Carl had just returned from the Torchwood delivery, and Matt had arrived to start his shift. “Anybody up for going for a drink after work?”


End file.
